September 7, 2012

So it turns out that Richard Aoki was an FBI informant after all. Seth Rosenfeld got his hands on over 200 pages of FBI files that make claims of “snitch jacketing” impossible unless you are willing to believe that the files seen here are fabricated.

Part of the problem we have been dealing with is Rosenfeld’s unfortunate blurring of the distinction between informant and provocateur. He explicitly names Aoki as an informant but implicitly as a provocateur as well. The business about giving guns to the Panthers and proposing that Berkeley students rob armories to get weapons to use against the National Guard lends itself to the interpretation that Aoki was entrapping people in the same fashion used against Muslims in the U.S.

As an informant, there was not much harm that Aoki could have done to groups like the SWP. Our members were not involved in illegal activity and had the reputation of avoiding adventures of the sort that some Maoist groups embraced.

But as a provocateur, Aoki could have wreaked havoc with inexperienced and impatient student youth. Yet Rosenfeld really makes little effort to connect the dots to the FBI even if political veterans like myself will inevitably make such a connection. This blurring of lines is of course a function of Rosenfeld trying to make a political point at the expense of clarity.

A deep mystery lingers over who Richard Aoki was and what made him tick. After reading his words in Diane Fujino’s “Samurai among Panthers”, I found it impossible to consider him an FBI informant except for a brief period when he was in high school. He struck me as an exemplary radical leader, even if his ultraleftism was counterproductive some of the time.

I wonder if there was an element of gamesmanship involved in his deception. Apparently he was a fan of Frederick Nietzsche long before he read Marx. Was there an element of the Superman and Beyond Good and Evil going on? I also am reminded of some of the classic Hong Kong policiers like Andrew Lau’s “Infernal Affairs” that was remade as “The Departed” by Martin Scorsese. In such films, cops are always penetrating triad gangs, although it would be difficult to imagine anybody in their right mind confusing the Panther’s Breakfast program with drug smuggling.

My guess is that there is a certain personality who is both drawn to infiltrating left groups as an informant and good at it to boot. In Peter Camejo’s memoir there is a chapter on the SWP’s suit against the FBI. At one point Judge Griesa orders the FBI to reveal the name of all the informants, including Ed Heisler who was Peter’s campaign manager.

Heisler was a national committee member of the SWP for a number of years, largely on the strength of his leadership in the UTU (United Transportation Union), a railway union. He wrote a book titled “A Struggle for Union Democracy: The Story of the Right to Vote Committee in the United Transportation Union” that is still for sale as a used book on Amazon.com for only $54.60. I imagine that anybody reading the book without foreknowledge of Heisler’s ties to the FBI would have the same reaction I had to Aoki’s “told to” narrative in Fujino’s book—what a great comrade. I have no idea what made Ed Heisler tick, except that it was well known that he used to patronize prostitutes when he was in the SWP and lived in rundown rooming houses. The first offense would have gotten him expelled if the party leadership had been on its toes. The second wasn’t really an offense but simply an indication that he was not socially integrated into our movement.

Of course, the most skilled informant of all time was Roman Malinovsky who represented the Bolsheviks in the Duma. In 1914 Malinovsky resigned his post, a violation of discipline that led to his expulsion. When Lenin’s “liquidationist” comrades, with whom he split in 1912, made a big stink about Malinovsky’s resignation, he reminded them of what they said about him only two years earlier—words that Lenin most certainly concurred with:

The deputy elected by the workers of the Moscow Gubernia is Roman Malinovsky, former secretary of the St. Petersburg Metalworkers’ Union. In his person the Social-Democratic group in the Duma acquires for the first time a prominent practical worker in the trade union movement, who in the grim years of reaction played an active part in the legal working-class organisations…

The years of Malinovsky’s secretaryship was a period in the life of the Union in which it had to contend, not only with severe external conditions, but also with the apathy of the workers themselves. Malinovsky’s personal example served as an effective weapon against this “internal enemy”.

His energy seemed inexhaustible. He undertook the responsible task of leading a strike with the same ardour as he carried out the painstaking work of organisation.

The Wikipedia entry on Malinovsky states:

By now he was an alcoholic, drinking vodka from teapots. His real identity was unveiled by his ex-mistress Elena Troyanovskaya, and he went into exile in Germany. When World War I broke out, he was interned into a POW camp by the Germans. Lenin, still standing by him, sent him clothes. He said: “If he is a provocateur, the police gained less from it than our Party did.” This refers to his strong anti-Menshevism. Eventually, Lenin changed his mind: “What a swine: shooting’s too good for him!”[6]

I for one would have made a terrible informant for the simple reason that I hate to lie. For long stretches in my life (except for the past 10 years of a blissful marriage) I have been single because I was incapable of lying to a woman in a relationship. If I was ever asked the question, “Do you love me?”, I could only tell the truth even if a no caused the woman to walk out on me. (Sometimes saying yes worked against me as well.)

I did lie on occasion using Bolshevik guile, bending the truth in order to advance the class struggle. After I started a job at Texas Commerce Bank in 1973, I was elected a delegate to the SWP convention months before I was eligible to get a vacation. So I went into my boss—the good Billy Penrod—and told him a lie straight out of a Seinfeld episode: my mother had died in an automobile accident. A few weeks after I got back to work I found out that Billy had made a donation to some charity in honor of my mother’s passing. I felt awful for months afterwards.

September 5, 2012

The North Star

Although my Maoist comrades will probably be disappointed in my failure to do a full-scale breast-beating self-criticism, I am now ready to admit that my original take on the Richard Aoki controversy was shortsighted.

I placed far too much credit in Seth Rosenfeld’s investigation based on his having been honored with a George Polk award in 1992. Named after a CBS correspondent who died in the Greek civil war (1946-1949), it is often given to fearless journalists such as Robert Knight, the WBAI radio reporter who received the award for his coverage of the U.S. invasion of Panama.

I also took into account the fact that he was a staff member of the Center for Investigative Reporting whose board members include Ben Bagdikian, Bill Moyers, and Mark Dowie (the author of Losing Ground, a tough-minded investigation of mainstream environmentalism and American Foundations, an equally tough-minded take-down of the Pew Charitable Trust and company.)

Finally, I placed a lot of trust in Wesley Swearingen’s involvement with Rosenfeld’s investigation since this former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agent is about as close to a Philip Agee as the bureau ever produced. In a January 15, 1979 New York Times profile on Swearingen, John Crewdson reported that the ex-agent accused the FBI of killing Fred Hampton in a “deliberate set-up.” I also heard Swearingen’s testimony first-hand on behalf of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) when it was suing the FBI as an occasional visitor to the courtroom in New York where the case was being heard.

So I was inclined to give Rosenfeld and Swearingen the benefit of the doubt. These are two men who appeared at first blush to be exemplars of integrity, and still are worthy of respect. However, I am afraid that Rosenfeld did not live up to past standards when writing about Aoki as I will now attempt to demonstrate. I have read his chapter on Aoki at least three times and have had the opportunity to read Diane Fujino’s Samurai Among Panthers, up to and including the chapter on the 1969 student strike at Berkeley.

August 30, 2012

You asked about my thoughts on the party’s turn toward electoral politics and community service programs. That’s a hard one for me because the party’s reformist turn, in my opinion, led to its demise. I’m having difficulty gauging when that turn took place. To me, it could’ve been averted in ’68 when Cleaver ran for president on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket. It was my opinion that he should have run as an independent on the Black Panther Party ticket, with Huey or Bobby as vice president. I understand that the Peace and Freedom Party was a much bigger organization and had more money. But for the Black liberation struggle to succeed, a politically independent party had to come out from the national Black American community. By ’68 the BPP was well known, so Eldridge should have run as a Black Panther with the BPP program. Don’t dilute it with the war thing, just the program. So I’m in favor of electoral politics when the organization can participate. If the government says you can run candidates, run your candidate. But there are times when they say your organization is outlawed, then don’t run it. But you don’t go underground until you absolutely have to go underground. Now here’s the second part. The foremost reason for running candidates is not to get elected per se but to get the political program out to the people. It doesn’t matter how many votes you get because you’re still working in the system. It’s doubly sticky if you’re in an alliance with a group that supports the system and you don’t. There’s a contradiction there. There’s no contradiction if you run the Panther on the Panther platform. They have a claim to be revolutionary